Clean air is good business

Commentary

Published 6:30 am, Friday, January 22, 2010

Some Texas leaders are up in arms at the prospect of more stringent national air quality regulations.

Such regulations, they argue, will hurt the economy by saddling businesses with unjustified costs.

“This EPA decision provides the illusion of greater protectiveness, but with no regard for cost, in terms of dollars or in terms of the freedoms that Americans are accustomed to,” huffed Bryan Shaw when the Environmental Protection Agency officially proposed the lowering of acceptable smog requirements to levels its scientists recommended in vain during the Bush administration.

But a study in the current issue of The Review of Economics and Statistics, jointly published by Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, indicates air pollution regulations have had a positive effect on the economy by reducing school absenteeism.

Texas (“a large industrial state that is a major producer of pollution”) had the honor of being selected as the laboratory for the study, in which the authors used sophisticated statistical devices to isolate air pollution from a range of other factors contributing to absenteeism.

Our qualifications: In 1998 we ranked first in the nation in two components of ozone and second in carbon monoxide.

The study didn't waste a lot of space establishing an economic rationale, citing one 1997 study summarizing other studies showing a link between child health and “human capital attainment.”

Children “who miss a lot of school achieve poorer grades, are less engaged with school, and are more likely to drop out,” the authors wrote. “Absences are also of concern to parents, who have to miss work, and to school districts, because state funding frequently depends on attendance,” an average of $30 per day in state funding per student in Texas.

Simply put, kids who do well in school end up producing and buying more as adults.

The study looked at the impact of several types of air pollution. It found that the one causing the most absenteeism was carbon monoxide, which is mostly produced by automobile and truck emissions.

‘Inversions' to blame

Houston and Laredo were among the top three cities in levels of carbon monoxide, but El Paso won the prize, partly because its mountainous topography sometimes provides “inversions” that trap pollution.

The study separates out such factors as weather, type of area and ethnic and socioeconomic status.

The data indicate that air pollution is democratic in its treatment of children: It laid low those on free lunch programs with as much vigor as those in affluent suburbs.

The study found that when carbon monoxide reaches 100 percent of the EPA threshold, school absences increase by about 1 percent of the student body.

In a district as large as HISD, that could mean about 2,000 students.

Glimmer of good news

At 75 percent to 100 percent, absenteeism jumps by about half that amount.

The good news is that the number of days in which carbon monoxide reaches those levels has dropped considerably because of federal automotive emission standards.

In El Paso, the 75 percent threshold was reached on 35 days in 1986, but only seven days in the school year of 2000-2001, the last year for which the researchers had attendance records.

Steven Rivkin, an Amherst economist who was one of the authors, noted that they found no relationship between ozone levels and absenteeism. But he did not suggest that ozone isn't harmful.

It may be, he said, that parents whose children are sensitive to high ozone levels, which tend to rise in the afternoon, heed well-publicized high-level warnings and keep their children inside “where ozone dissipates rapidly.”

Note: I was alerted to the study by an article in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

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